Change PDF Viewer back to Acrobat or Reader in Google Chrome

UPDATE: April 24, 2015

In the latest version of Chrome, NPAPI plugins (whatever that means) are not enabled by default. These have been deemed “experimental” and you need to explicitly enable them. Adobe Acrobat or Reader browser plugins use the NPAPI to invoke the browser plugin.

The instructions below have been updated to incorporate these steps.

Note that this will enable all NPAPI plugins. As Google has deemed it experimental, review your list of plugins, and disable the ones you don’t need.

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Around December 2010 I noticed that Google Chrome, in it’s latest update (version 8.0.552.215), slipped in an integrated PDF viewer. So your PDF files are not rendered in the browser using the Adobe plug-ins. So if you’re wondering, for example, why 3D models won’t render, or embedded SWFs are not playing, you should revert to the good old Adobe PDF plug-in.

If you want to revert to the good old Adobe plugins, here’s what you do:

I had been using Firefox and switched to Chrome. While with Firefox, I had downloaded an Adobe plugin. When I started Chrome, I did not like the Chrome PDF Viewer (no functionality). So I went to Chrome://Plugins, DISABLED the Chrome PDF Viewer and ENABLED the plug-in listed below to see if it worked. It did, surprisingly. Now I can use almost all the functions of Acrobat without leaving the browser. Not sure what troubles this may cause down the road, but for now it works really well.

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